“Come, now, what do you want of me?”
“Sir,” said Marius, “I know that my presence is displeasing to you, but I have come merely to ask one thing of you, and then I shall go away immediately.”
“You are a fool!” said the old man.
“Who said that you were to go away?”
This was the translation of the tender words which lay at the bottom of his heart:— “Ask my pardon!
Throw yourself on my neck!”
M. Gillenormand felt that Marius would leave him in a few moments, that his harsh reception had repelled the lad, that his hardness was driving him away; he said all this to himself, and it augmented his grief; and as his grief was straightway converted into wrath, it increased his harshness.
He would have liked to have Marius understand, and Marius did not understand, which made the goodman furious.
He began again:—
“What! you deserted me, your grandfather, you left my house to go no one knows whither, you drove your aunt to despair, you went off, it is easily guessed, to lead a bachelor life; it’s more convenient, to play the dandy, to come in at all hours, to amuse yourself; you have given me no signs of life, you have contracted debts without even telling me to pay them, you have become a smasher of windows and a blusterer, and, at the end of four years, you come to me, and that is all you have to say to me!”
This violent fashion of driving a grandson to tenderness was productive only of silence on the part of Marius.
M. Gillenormand folded his arms; a gesture which with him was peculiarly imperious, and apostrophized Marius bitterly:—
“Let us make an end of this.
You have come to ask something of me, you say?
Well, what?
What is it?
Speak!”
“Sir,” said Marius, with the look of a man who feels that he is falling over a precipice,
“I have come to ask your permission to marry.”
M. Gillenormand rang the bell.
Basque opened the door half-way.
“Call my daughter.”
A second later, the door was opened once more, Mademoiselle Gillenormand did not enter, but showed herself; Marius was standing, mute, with pendant arms and the face of a criminal; M. Gillenormand was pacing back and forth in the room.
He turned to his daughter and said to her:—
“Nothing.
It is Monsieur Marius.
Say good day to him.
Monsieur wishes to marry.
That’s all.
Go away.”
The curt, hoarse sound of the old man’s voice announced a strange degree of excitement.
The aunt gazed at Marius with a frightened air, hardly appeared to recognize him, did not allow a gesture or a syllable to escape her, and disappeared at her father’s breath more swiftly than a straw before the hurricane.
In the meantime, Father Gillenormand had returned and placed his back against the chimney-piece once more.
“You marry!
At one and twenty!
You have arranged that!
You have only a permission to ask! a formality.
Sit down, sir.
Well, you have had a revolution since I had the honor to see you last.
The Jacobins got the upper hand.
You must have been delighted.
Are you not a Republican since you are a Baron?
You can make that agree.
The Republic makes a good sauce for the barony.
Are you one of those decorated by July?
Have you taken the Louvre at all, sir?
Quite near here, in the Rue Saint-Antoine, opposite the Rue des Nonamdieres, there is a cannon-ball incrusted in the wall of the third story of a house with this inscription:
‘July 28th, 1830.’
Go take a look at that.
It produces a good effect.